| BPM provides three constructs to define context of use: organization , role , and user . These Business Process Management “specific constructs do not correspond to any J2EE users or roles. -
Organization ” A company, business unit, department, or any such categorization. -
Role ” A business function or responsibility such as Admin. -
User ” A user of a business process who is generally responsible for a specific business task. A user always has a default organization assigned and can be mapped to one or more roles. The roles can have one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one associations with users. A role must be mapped with a group in WebLogic Server. Workflows are created using Studio (see the next section, BPM Tools ). The workflow definitions are referred to as templates , which are stored in a persistence store like a database. A template can have multiple definitions or versions based on effective and expiry dates. These dates determine a range of time when a particular version of a template can be executed. Some of the important constructs you ll encounter while designing business processes are the following: -
Actions ” When you re designing a workflow by defining nodes such as Start, Task, Decision, Done, and so on, you need to define actions. Actions are tasks that need to be performed at various points in the workflow. A Task represents a user-defined logical unit of business function. An action can be as simple as sending a notification like an email or calling another application to do a custom task. For example, the E2E_OrderWorkflow uses the AI framework to persist the order into back-end order management tables. -
Variables ” Variables hold runtime data. Variables can be used to evaluate a condition in a decision node of a business process. The types of variables supported are Double, Integer, String, Boolean, Date, Java Object, Entity EJB, Session EJB, and XML. -
Exception Handlers ” Business processes can be very complex and are prone to exception due to abnormal conditions. You can write custom exception handlers to handle such conditions for one or a series of actions. |
